“MOREDA 1234 PCS
UPI A 7N DA
BULLETIN PRECEDE KENNEDY
DALLAS, NOV. 22 THREE SHOTS WERE FIRED TODAY AT PRESIDENT KENNEDY’S MOTORCADE IN DOWNTOWN DALLAS
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“Forty years ago this November, United Press International Teletype machines in newsrooms across the world rang five bells to signal that a major story was moving across the wire. The news that something had gone terribly wrong in Dallas was transmitted some four minutes after shots were fired at President John F. Kennedy’s motorcade.
In 1963, there were no live television mini-cam pictures relayed by satellite to a shocked nation. Reporters largely had to rely on bulky typewriters, land-line telephones, heavy tape recorders and massive cameras to get the story out. They didn’t have cell phones, computers, satellite or fiber-optic communications.
But one thing they did have was incredible access.
At a time when security was far less rigorous and reporters got much closer to news events, many of them literally had front-row seats for an event that changed America forever. Their stories are included in “President Kennedy Has Been Shot!,” a book we compiled for the Newseum that tells the story of the assassination and its aftermath through the eyes of more than 60 journalists who were in Dallas, Washington, D.C., New York and on Air Force One.
UPI White House reporter Merriman Smith filed the first bulletin so quickly because he was riding in a press pool car just five vehicles behind the limousine carrying President Kennedy and his wife. The pool car was equipped with what passed then for breakthrough communications technology: a radiotelephone. In a legendary scuffle, Smith wrestled with his Associated Press competitor for the phone and refused to give it up until he had dictated the first bulletin to his office. The pool car sped past the limousine carrying Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson and arrived at Parkland Memorial Hospital moments after the presidential limousine. Remarkably, the reporters were able to walk directly up to the car parked at the hospital’s emergency entrance and witness the wrenching scene inside. The mortally wounded president lay face down, cradled by his wife. Texas Gov. John Connally, also wounded, lay on his back in the arms of his wife.
“We were standing literally a couple of feet from the car, staring down at Kennedy,” recalls ABC White House correspondent Bob Clark, the only surviving reporter from the pool car. “He was stretched out in the back seat. He was lying with the side of his head exposed and his head in Jackie’s lap. It was just a frozen scene. Jackie was sitting there, saying nothing. We had to wait a minute or so for the stretchers to come out.
“Relations were much better with the Secret Service in those days. Today, they’d keep the press a quarter of a mile away if they could in a situation like that. In those days, nobody tried to stop us at all. They knew all the reporters. They simply let us go up and stand as close as we could.”
It was a different era in journalism. Reporters had more relaxed relationships with law enforcement and other authorities. Before any official announcement was made, a Secret Service agent flatly told UPI’s Smith that Kennedy was dead (a fact that he carefully qualified in his ongoing updates). Several reporters were able to get inside the Texas Book Depository building before police sealed it off, and one of them, Tom Alyea, accompanied police officers as they searched the entire building for the assassin.
“In those days we had access to everything,” says Bert Shipp, then the assistant news director for WFAA-TV, the ABC affiliate in Dallas. “We could walk into banks, check out the vault, go into police stations. I used to sit in on interrogations. Everything was open to us.”
“Things were so different in those days,” adds Bob Schieffer, a young reporter for the Ft. Worth Star-Telegram in 1963 who went on to national prominence as anchor of CBS’ “Face the Nation.” “For one thing, we never told people who we were as journalists. If people asked, we were instructed never to lie, but if they assumed we were a policeman or detective, we let them believe that, which is why I always wore a black, snap-brimmed hat when I worked at the police station because that’s what the detectives wore.”
But increased access sometimes led to cronyism and self-imposed censorship. Reporters did not always reveal private details, including details of Kennedy’s illnesses or affairs. On the day of the assassination, several reporters could not bring themselves to describe the blood on Mrs. Kennedy’s suit, and others withheld details they wish now that they hadn’t.
Schieffer was in the Star-Telegram’s city room when he got a bizarre call from the mother of suspected assassin Lee Harvey Oswald, who asked for help in getting a ride to the Dallas police station to see her son. In the car, Marguerite Oswald barely mentioned the terrible shooting or concerns about her son, complaining to Schieffer that people would donate more money to Oswald’s wife and that she would be left to fend for herself. Schieffer was so horrified that he couldn’t bring himself to put some of her quotes in his story.
“I really learned a lesson as a reporter, and that is, you have to be very careful about censoring what people tell you because, oftentimes, they’re telling you what they want you to know,” Schieffer says. “As it turned out, she was obsessed about money.”
Schieffer used his “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy to remain with Mrs. Oswald in the Dallas police station for several hours before someone found out he was a reporter.
Today, access for journalists is often limited by rope lines and corrals far from the main event. For those who think the press is too invasive, boundaries make sense. But history is not often well served by observation from a distance.
Three reporters were allowed to witness the swearing-in of new president Lyndon Johnson on Air Force One just hours after the assassination. Two flew back to Washington with him, and history would be far less complete without their intimate accounts of Mrs. Kennedy sitting vigil next to her husband’s casket in a back cabin and the wrenching calls that Johnson made during the flight to Kennedy’s mother.
The reporters were given so much access that one of them, Newsweek’s Charles Roberts, later said, “I think that probably this was the only time in my life that I ever felt like saying to a president of the United States, “Look, I know you want to talk, but I’ve got a lot of work to do.”
One of the most searing images of all time is Lee Harvey Oswald’s face twisted in pain as Jack Ruby fires a fatal bullet into him. Though debates have raged over whether the prisoner could have been better protected, the shooting was broadcast live on national television and captured in a Pulitzer Prize-winning photograph because a score of reporters were allowed to witness his transfer from one jail to another.
In the end, there was one final grant of access that few reporters wanted. When Oswald was buried in Ft. Worth, reporters were asked to carry his casket because there were no pallbearers. Associated Press correspondent Mike Cochran initially refused but quickly reconsidered when his competition agreed to do it.
“If there’s one thing I knew,” Cochran says now, “stupid as I may have been, inexperienced as I may have been–if UPI was going to be a pallbearer, I was damn sure going to be a pallbearer.”
